Before a full auditorium this past Tuesday evening (October 9), Vishal Mangalwadi explored the concept of human dignity by telling the story of a desperately ill child in his Indian village. This was the fourth in his 10-part series “Must the Sun Set on the West?”

As he and his wife Ruth worked in central India at village-level social reform (in the mid-1970s), they came across a family whose 18-month old daughter lay dying amidst filth. Her parents were starving her. Despite their repeated efforts to aid the child by feeding and caring for her, she eventually died after they returned her to the family.

To Mangalwadi and his wife, both of whom were by that time deeply committed Christians with advanced degrees, this tragedy revealed the clash of two worldviews. On the one hand, the girl’s poor parents embraced a view of reality that viewed a baby girl as an expensive liability. “The parents didn’t know their own dignity,” said Mangalwadi. “They believed their poverty was inevitable.”

The Mangalwadis, by contrast, embraced a Christian perspective which recognizes that every human being is a creature of dignity by virtue of God’s image. It was that perspective which drove Ann Sullivan to pour her life into “deaf and dumb” Helen Keller, who eventually became an international spokesperson for the rights of the disabled.

Exploring the issue more deeply, Mangalwadi showed how the nominalists of 14th and 15th century Europe recognized that since God was free--and not bound by the rules of logic--then humans must be free to change their history. Along with this idea was the idea that the incarnation (God becoming human) also sealed the concept of human dignity. They recognized that God did not choose to become a dog, for example, but a human being (in Jesus Christ).

Tragically, the devolution of human dignity began with Darwin’s Origin of the Species, but most centrally when thinkers like William James developed a materialist concept of emotions, namely, that emotions are fundamentally located in the body and not the mind. Freud picked this up and came to equate love with sex, so that love is nothing more than a function of bodily desire.

Freud, however, is untenable in his view, said Mangalwadi. One’s emotional reactions depend, at least in part, on one’s beliefs and values, which are, in fact, chosen beliefs and values. Thus, we are not merely animals, as Freud wanted to conclude, but spiritual beings capable of transcending the instinctive.